Tag Archives: celibacy

I have this incredibly awesome gift most people would KILL for. When I’m not sexually involved, I can flip my libido off like a lightswitch. It’s why I’m so content to not date. Because dating just toys with my resolve. Once I’m on the business end of a kiss? Whew.

First off, a big thank you to the cute blonde across the way who keeps wandering around in boxers and no shirt. Love those pecs. Welcome to the neighbourhood, neighbour.

Kindness… With Strings

If you attach conditions to kindness, it doesn’t seem to be so much that it’s humanitarianism you’re after, y’know?

So, it was with great amusement – albeit bitter and pissed amusement – that I took note of the sanctimonious stipulations attached to all the “donations” being made by the Bush administration since 2003 in the name of AIDS assistance throughout the world. This was all shown during the brilliant Frontline “The Age of AIDS” documentary I mentioned in an earlier posting.

When it comes to countries like Uganda and Brazil, they’ve stood face-to-face with some pretty grave dangers posed by the horrific disease, and through understanding the culture and society in their nations, they’ve managed to come up with social programs to stem the rate of infections.

In Uganda, they teach abstinence and faithfulness, but they also implore the public to use condoms. There’s an intense movement towards education, and they’ve managed to go from having one of the highest incidences of AIDS to a much more stable number (and I’m too lazy to grab facts right now). The government was providing copious free condoms for the public to use. This proved extremely effective.

In Brazil, they’re not kidding themselves. It’s a very sexual country. They work hand in hand with the sex trades to try and control the amount of unprotected sex going around, and they push condoms onto the public awareness stage. It’s working. They’ve also created a system by which their citizens are ENTITLED to the drug cocktail known to keep HIV in check (most of the time). They’ve struck deals with pharmaceutical corporations and they have in-nation drug-manufacturing plants that allow them to make drugs for their citizens at a reasonable price. This is not a wealthy nation, but they have their shit together.

The US has attached stipulations to both these nations. In Uganda, the government provision of free condoms for the masses has apparently dropped by 80% since the Bush administration intervened, favouring instead the preaching of abstinence. In Brazil, they were insisting the Brazil government condemn prostitution (as it’s legal there), which prompted the Brazilian government to say, essentially, “Fuck you” to the money so they could maintain their autonomy.

Brazil’s aggressive approach to controlling AIDS, which includes HIV treatment, massive condom distribution and explicit HIV education, has produced one of the few success stories in the developing world: In the early 1990s experts projected 1.2 million infections in Brazil by 2000, but the interventions cut that number in half.

As the Brazilian government rep said to the documentary’s producers, “This year it’s prostitutes, and maybe next year it’s homosexuals. Where do you stop?”

That’s a very good question. Where do you stop?

You stop when it’s your moralizing that is limiting the potential for other nations to save the lives of their citizens. You stop when it’s your failure to realize that husbands and wives get AIDS and, thanks to their marriage vows, they should expect to be able express their love in physical terms, and telling them to abstain, and not to use a condom is something that will get you laughed out of most bedrooms. You stop when your vision is so narrow that you’re not even seeing the dangerous ramifications of your moralizing. You stop when the disease has afflicted more than 5 million people in a single year (2005). You stop when the total number of dead now exceeds 25 million in just 25 years. You stop when more than 40 million people are living with it worldwide.

You stop when your sanctimonious beliefs mean you’re being a hypocrite to the very faith you profess to believe in. It’s about saving lives. It’s about letting people live, helping people live, and, if you happen to believe in an afterlife, letting God do the judging at the end of those lives.

You just fucking stop. You help. You do whatever the fuck you can to end the deaths. Because that’s what a good person does. They help in the face of all adversity. They help when they’re called upon. They don’t put conditions on it. They don’t judge those needing help. They just help.

If, in fact, AIDS (as Pat Robertson and his ilk believe) is an epidemic unleashed by God in an effort to punish the immoral, then why has “He” given man the tools to treat it even the least little bit?

I despise hypocrisy. More importantly, I despise the knowledge that 40 million people on this planet will more than likely die from this disease that we seem unable to find a cure for, but that many of them will die far sooner than they need to, and more will contract it than are necessary, all because of to many governments who have been too ashamed to admit they need help, or those who are too fucking sanctimonious to offer help without strings.

The United States wants to be a world leader? Then fucking lead from the trenches, not the pulpits. Get in there and get dirty, and don’t worry how the fuck it looks. Be like Nike, and just do it.

IMPORTANT NOTE: I just read this, and it blows my mind. YOUTH, AGED 15-24, ACCOUNT FOR MORE THAN HALF OF ALL NEW HIV INFECTIONS WORLDWIDE. More than 6,000 are infected daily. Wear condoms, kids! Fuckin’ hell!

I get a lot of emails from readers from time to time, and for some reason, this past week has been filled with emails. Some are easy answers, some are ones I don’t want to tackle, some involve giving instruction (which I dislike doing, so I take my time), and some are just total mind-fucks, like this one.

The long and the short of it is a bit complicated, and due to privacy concerns, I don’t want to quote his email directly. Let’s call him Jimi, since he sounds like the rockstar type.

When he and his girlfriend got together, they had wild marathon sex constantly. He couldn’t get enough of her and it seemed to be mutual. He’s a guy with a sex drive in overdrive, and having a partner who’s into sex as much as he is happens to be a pretty major consideration when committing. He thought he had that in this woman.

She changed, suddenly, when her father had a heart attack. It turns out that she was raised Catholic, and in this moment of crisis, she turned to God and made a vow that, if her father was to live, she would abstain from sex until marriage.

Although he neglects to mention, I’m pretty sure the father lived, because Jimi hasn’t been getting laid much in the last two years. He’s in love with the girl, so he’s taking this in stride, but after two years of little happening, he’s nearing breaking point. Don’t get this wrong, she’s been getting her orgasms. He pleasures her orally, etc, and occasionally they “slip” and have sex, which is always good, but he says that, since she vowed God she’d abstain, he finds himself embroiled in guilt after they’ve finished. While he does non-intercourse things to satisfy her, it seems she doesn’t return the favours. Not very democratic, eh?

His dilemma is, how does he proceed? Does he marry her? Does he break up? Does he confront her? Honestly, fuck if I know.

Here’s the deal: Catholicism is a life-long all-ages ticket to ride the guilt train. You cannot possibly understand the absolutely overbearing sense of guilt and fear that is bred into you when you’re raised Catholic unless you’ve been exposed first-hand. Trust me, I not only drank the Kool-aid but spent 10 years in Catholic school, going to mass probably 5 times a week for 60% of that time. Guilt has been a lifelong struggle for me. It does not ever go away, as far as I can tell thus far.

And I understand the absolute horror of knowing your parent could die. I was far closer to my mother than I am to my father, and even so, when my father nearly suffered a stroke last year, I was terrified.

Religion, as we’ve all heard, is a crutch. Take that as you like, but when it comes down to difficult times, religion’s a pretty easy thing to lean on to get you through. Adversity is hard on all of us, but having a creed that tells you everything’s gonna be all right after the dying of the light somehow makes it easier to get through, regardless of how much you live your life according to the faith.

That said, I’ve made my own vows to God. I can’t remember what I promised then, but I remember being in the shower and just knowing with absolute certainty my mother was going to die, and promising God I’d behave better, be more moral, give up drugs, whatever the fuck I promised, if only she’d live.

She died. I was off the hook – literally and figuratively. I descended into a few years of craziness and here we are now. If she’d lived, I’m pretty sure my life would be a world away from where it is now, whether I liked it or not. That’s the price you pay when you promise God to behave better, and you secretly believe in His wrath, thanks to the upbringing you’ve been dealt.

Girlfriend made her vow, and now she’s struggling to keep it. The question is, where does that leave Jimi?

Between a rock and a hard place.

I’m a firm believer that, whatever you enter a relationship for – their looks, their personality, their sex drive – that you are, essentially, entitled to a reasonable expectation that that status quo will continue. If their sex drive dries up overnight, you have reason to be concerned about the future of your relationship. If they gain 60lbs, you have every right to be upset about the change in your lover. If they become moody and morose and give you no reason to enjoy spending time with them, you have cause to be concerned. It’s not selfish – it’s simply expecting your partner to live up to the terms of the agreement; that they are the person you fell for, and will continue to be that person, or will at least change in ways that are congruent to who they were at the time of the initial hook-up.

In the restaurant business, one of the “rules” for success is, you’re only as good as your last service. In relationships, we all go through rough patches, but the immediate past is the part that’s most relevant to the present, not the good times that were had five years past. Problems emerge, solutions need to be found, and life can hopefully continue. But if you’ve gone and changed the rules of the relationship without cluing in your lover, you are establishing grounds for dismissal.

Relationships go two ways. Agreements and communication and compromises are the lifeblood of any good relationship. If you have adversity and need to change how you’re acting in the relationship, you need to discuss that with your lover, otherwise, they have good reason for leaving you. It’s really that simple.

So, Girlfriend’s withdrawn the sex that made her so desirable. Fortunately, she still has personality and a lot to offer. The question is, can Jimi handle living a life with less sexual promise? That depends on him. She’s essentially notched herself down from love interest-non-pareil to friend with occasional benefit.

Her motivations for doing so may be questionable to the rest of us. Who knows, maybe Jimi can solve his problems over Bloody Marys and a little rat poisoning during a tete-a-tete with the father, but something tells me that, one way or the other, he needs to come to terms with the fact that his lover had no problem making a decision that impacted both of their lives in a dramatic way. Instead of turning to him for support, she turned to God. Not that I’m saying turning to God is a bad thing, I’m just saying Jimi should have been consulted before she decided the future of their relationship without his input.

And when she decided sex was no longer on the menu, she should have done the right thing and said, “This will change things between us, and while I can live with that, you need to decide if you can.”

The facts are, Jimi, pretty simple: She has changed, whether you want to understand why or not. She made a major decision without consulting you. She handles stress, clearly, in less than practical ways. She withholds sex either to punish herself or punish you, whether the eyes of God are watching or not. If things haven’t changed back to what you call normalcy yet, you need to accept that they may not ever change. She has a reason to explain away her lack of interest in sex now, and if you marry, who’s to say she won’t find a new reason then?

Your relationship is only as good as the recent past has been. We can’t go into our Way Back machines and remember fondly the way it usedta be, because the facts are, it is what it is, and you have to go with the averages.

Am I telling you to walk? No. I’m telling you to be realistic. Will she change back to the girl of old? Who fucking knows. Is that a gamble you’re willing to stake your sexual future on? Who fucking knows. Can you justify cheating on her to get what you need while she figures herself out again? No. Not for a second.

So you have a choice to make. You want to hold on to the memories of how it used to be and might one day be again, or do you want to live in the moment and experience life as it unfolds? You decide.

You could always let her know exactly why you’re going through so much emotional turmoil over this, and tell her you’ve been patient, you’ve tried to understand, but that she ultimately changed the rules of the game without telling you, and you’ve never had the option to choose – but now you’re making that choice, and you’re around if she decides you’re worth changing her mind about that vow, but for now, you need to discover yourself again.

Either way, you’re in a shitty situation. I feel sympathy for her, but she’s up against a mighty powerful religion that really, really fucks with your conscience. That, I know first-hand. Good luck, dude.

About Steff

This is my interstellar craft of truth and wit. Buckle up. If you want celebrity gossip, this is not the blog for you. If you want comfortable postings that’ll fill you with happy fuzzy thoughts about the world at large, or self-help guru shit, this is not the blog for you.Read more

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